Delaware treasury's website hacked

The website of the Delaware State Treasury was hacked early Monday by a group espousing a pro-Palestinian message. The message appeared on the front of the site Monday morning before state officials, and a company that hosts the agency's site, responded.

"Hacking sites will not STOP!!! Unless Gaza is Free," the message read in part.

The website remained down for most of Monday, but was relaunched shortly after 4 p.m. State officials were first notified of the issue at 7:30 a.m. Monday.

State officials say that the office's website had not been hosted on state government servers, with the treasurer's office opting instead to use a third-party company to host the site. No other state agency websites were hacked.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Jack Markell said early Monday that officials from the state's Department of Technology and Information were "assisting Treasury staff, who are working to resolve the issue with the vendor they contracted to host the site."

Elayne Starkey, chief security officer at DTI, said it appeared that no data on the website had been compromised, and the hackers appeared only to deface the site with a pro-Palestinian message.

"We're not aware of any type of data breach or data loss or anything along those lines. At this point we are treating it as just a web defacement," Starkey said.

Contact Jonathan Starkey at 983-6756, on Twitter @jwstarkey or at jstarkey@delawareonline.com.